The highly hip Slash label snapped them up, and a year later the band released their sophomore long player, Mighty Joe Monn, which saw them narrowing their focus upon the more contemplative and introspective tendencies of vocalist and song writer Grant Lee Phillips. A year of intensive touring followed, winding up with the main supoort slot for REM's renewed assault upon the world early last year. After a short break it was back into the studio for the 'difficult' third album, Copperopolis.
Taken in the context of its predecessors, Copperopolis eschews the broad mix of Fuzzy, choosing instead to mine the seam of dreamy agrarian melodies that featured so heavily on Mighty Joe Moon, as Grant Lee Phillips explained recently between mouthfuls of noodles down the phone from his home in LA.
"With us it's always a case of looking back over our previous records and asking ourselves 'What could we do better? What areas do we want to focus on? What areas do we want to define?'. " he ponders, "and looking back on Fuzzy, our first record there's a diversity there which is something that was important to us. The album represented many different sides to the band, and not just to be one song. But there's a consistency to the second album in tone that we wanted to carry through to the third. In some ways we've taken the best from the first album and the second to use in the third, but so much more than that. There's a lot of ideas going around the third album that haven't been worked out - yet."
"The first album, some of those songs were recorded before we even signed a record deal, recorded in a garage-turned-studio in North Hollywood," he continues. "So that album was a kind of quiltwork of different periods of time. The songs Fuzzy, Dixie Drugstore and Stars And Stripes were recorded before we ever went into the record deal, meanwhile the rest of it was recorded a month or so after that, so it is a very diverse recordbecause of that. And Mighty Joe Moon is a little bit like that in that we continued to tour throughout the making of the record. So this time around we really were attempting to capture a moment in time, something really concentrated and make it count."
"We were dealing with themes that were at once universal and also really personal. Human ideas are beginning to change, transition, all these kind of things that are natural to all of us. It's a very different record. It has ties to Mighty Joe Moon, but it's a very different record," Phillips concludes.
For mine, the stand out track on Copperopolis is Bethlehem Steel, an ode to the death of a steel manufacturing town and the hopes and aspirations of its inhabitants, neaty surrounding the town. It's a song very much tied to a time and place (like much of Grant Lee Phillips' writing), and as such complements the album title, Copperopolis being a mining town near where Phillips grew up.
"Bethlehem Steel evokes a really storng setting and to do that I drew upon my own experiences. I worked in a factory, a sheet metal factory, when I was about sixteen. So I just kind of drew on those experiences and tried to create something that felt very pastoral; something that was industrial, but also very pastoral. A romantic way of looking at it."
Sort of like William Blake's Jerusalem I blurt out, in a moment of intellectual over-indulgence.
"Okay, I like that," replies a rather bemused Grant, before chuckling, "Man oh man! That's not a comparison, but I'll roll with it...".
Continuing the geographical theme, we move on to Hyperion and Sunset, my other pick of the album.
"What I was basically referring to in that song was two interconnecting boulevards in a section of Los Angeles, Hyperion Boulevarde and Sunset Boulevarde. I had this idea of living in a place where the earth rolled. We have this primitive relationship with the ground we walk on, that we build our homes on. Hyperion and Sunset is partially about my relationship with Los Angeles and the people."
"I'm kind of edging my way nearer to the epicentre. I'm in North Hollywood now, but for the first two years I lived here I resided in the high desert which is quite a bit different. It's less suburban than the Valley...but I'm trying to roll with that too. I've had a good time living here in LA, and I feel like I'm some part of this."
I can't help asking why anyone would want to live in the centre of such a hyperbolical town as LA.
"To be honest I don't know that the city has a centre, but there's still a romantic notion about Hollywood. I recorded our album in Hollywood, just trying to soak up a different kind of energy. And plus we were albe to live and stay at home during the making of the record, I don't know, I think there's still an attraction that the city holds for me. I may never get any closer than this side of the Valley, but Hollywood's still a magical place to be. Someone asked me if it lived up to all of my fantasies that I had as a child, my thoughts are that I still fantasise about Hollywood."
"I look on it as a big back lot, full of props and costumes, and Los Angeles is there for the taking. You can make it what you want to make it. It's up to you."
For the recording of Copperopolis, the band once again employed the production talents of bassist Paul Kimble.
"Once again it's a unique thing to us, that we possess someone in the band who's capable of taping our sound," explains Phillips. "In the end it's very much a group effort. but Paul amongst the three of us has the techincal know how, and he also has a production voice that's unique to him. All of that stuff is completely subjective, and my inclinations are very similar and in line with Paul's and (drummer) Joey's, so we're generally always pleased. It's an open forum. We generally leave him to his own devices for a period, and then Joey and I step in and give him our feedback and we go from there. It's a relationship that's developed over time. We began playing in Paul's living room years ago and at some point we began recording the stuff on a four track and then on a sixteen track and the years have added up - so have the tracks - and the songs and everything else."
"We're constantly asked that question by people who are fans of our records, 'Have you thought of working with a different producer?'. And the case with us is that we've just begun to hit our stride, and it's not so much about taking our record to someone else and letting them turn it into their vision, it's more a group effort and just a really intimate rapport we have with one another."
Gavin Sawford.